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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Turning the Pages

  
 
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04:45 / 09.10.05
Start reading here.

Leaving aside the argument about whether digitized copies can ever really replace actual physical texts, what do you think? Exciting? Disappointing? A little of both?

I was excited about the opportunity to virtually examine some of these old texts, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, but disappointed that too little of the text had been digitized for me to actually read any continuous section of text. The Diamond Sutra, though, may be there in its entirety; I can't tell as I can't read it and don't know what it's supposed to look like.
 
 
sleazenation
12:25 / 09.10.05
Ah the British Library. A fantastic resource that suffers slightly under the pressures of what is practical. It is not feasible to keep its entire inventory in one location. Nor is it feasible to give access to to readers to the shelves. So the reader/researcher is left reliant on vague and imprecise abstracts to work out if the book that has come up on a seach of the library's electronic catalogue is actually what they are looking for or not.

This is where digitized versions of the texts would prove invaluable. Perviously you would have to order books relatively blindly based on imprecise info in the catalogue. It would then take a few days for the book to be located, picked up from whatever storage location it usually resides in and be transported to the London Library reading rooms. Only then did the reader/researcher find out for certain if the books was actually what they were or not.

With digitized versions you can litterally see for your self almost instantly if the book is what you are looking for or not.

Not that I think that digitized texts are in any way a valid replacement for 'analogue' books. As has been pointed out in the past paper, papyrus and stone tablets have proven far more robust and resiliant as formats than magnetic media and computer code... (and that is still the basis of most digital memory on the market...)
 
  
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